In October, Vishwanathan Anand will defend his title against Vladimir Kramnik in Germany, and each player will earn about $1 million, since they agreed to split the money.

The winner will defend his title against the survivor of a Gata Kamsky-Veselin Topalov match also planned for 2008. Bulgarian sponsors have offered $2 million to host that match, but Kamsky will unlikely be willing to play in Topalov’s homeland, where the Sofia GM is a national hero.

Bear in mind that when Bobby Fischer became the champ in 1972, he received what was considered a sky-high prize of $160,000.

The record prize fund for a chess match is the $3 million for the 1990 Anatoly Karpov-Garry Kasparov match – but prize funds have been sinking faster than the value of a subprime mortgage.

Since 1990, the most anyone has earned from a match is the $1.33 million pocketed by Kramnik in 2000, when he dethroned Kasparov. The total prize fund for the Kramnik-Topalov match that reunified the championship title in 2006 was only $1million.

Still, that’s a long way from the first world championship match, held at Fifth Avenue and 14th Street back in 1886. Wilhelm Steinitz got $2,000 – and loser Mikhail Tchigorin went home to Russia with nothing.

BRIDGE CY the Cynic is seriously overweight: If he left his body to science, science would contest the will. But Cy won’t believe he has a problem.

“I got on the bathroom scale,” he told me, “and when I saw what it read, I had to face an unavoidable fact.”

“You need to reduce,” I suggested gently.

“The scale is broken,” said the Cynic.

Cy’s dummy play was broken at today’s slam. When West led the king of clubs, Cy took the ace, drew trumps and tried a spade finesse with the queen. East took the king and thought it unlikely Cy would have operated that way if he had a club loser, so East returned a spade.

With a club return, Cy could ruff, take the ace of diamonds, finesse with the jack, discard a spade on the king, ruff dummy’s last diamond and run his trumps, squeezing West in spades and clubs. As it was, West’s nine of spades forced out the ace, and though Cy won a diamond finesse with the jack, he took only six trumps, three diamonds, a spade and a club.

How would you play the slam?

Cy succeeds if he gives proper weight to dummy’s club holding. After Cy draws trumps, he takes the A-K of diamonds and ruffs a diamond. When the queen falls, Cy leads a trump to dummy and returns the jack of clubs, pitching a spade as a loser-on-loser. West wins, but Cy later discards two more spades on the jack of diamonds and 10 of clubs.

If the queen of diamonds didn’t fall, Cy would try a spade to the queen for his 12th trick.